Talk Tech: The Witcher 2

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Apropos of nothing, I’ve joined the rest of RPS in becoming deeply excited about The Witcher 2. Look at it! Swords, hair, grass. Great. Last month Jim posted a nine minute video of CD Projekt talking about the tech behind the game, and today they’ve released part 2, which awaits you beneath the jump. At one point they use the word “polish”, which I of course read as “Polish”, in the context that they would “Polish” their game engine. That was weird.
Clearly the best line in the video is this:

“That’s why we chose to use middleware- that is, technology from internal companies. One of them is the Path Engine. It is a navigation library, allowing a drunkard to merrily stroll from the inn to his home.”

How so? Only I don’t recall any massive physics fuck ups while playing a game that used PhysX. Havok is nothing more than a comedy factor added to some games for reasons of ignorance or humour. Sadly in CDPR’s case it seems to be the former.

I have a Radeon HD 5750 graphics card. It’s definitely not the best but it runs most new games at least 30fps with full settings at 1600×900 (my monitor resolution). However, running games with Physx like Mafia 2 cause the game to chug horribly. Turning Physx off in the settings gets me about 4x the frame rate. It sucks because I’d really rather have better physics, but not at the cost of the game being unplayable.

As for ownership, it appears that Intel now owns Havok. So I guess AMD owners are screwed no matter what when it comes to an unbiased physics engine. I will say that at the moment Havok runs a lot better on my machine than Physx though.

For one thing, I wasn’t asking about the corporate politics of the situation. I’m aware that AMD are cautious about supporting PhysX because they’d be giving Nvidia too much control over the market. But what relevance does that even have when I didn’t even mention PhysX in the first place?

In any case, those aren’t the only two options available.

When CDPR claim that they’re using third party technology because it works perfectly and among them is fucking Havok of all things… well I’ve got to facepalm. No choice in the matter. It’s instinctive.

Secondly, not a game on the market needs more than one graphics card. Consoles have been retarding graphics development for years. Which is why, in terms of system requirements, things have barely moved forward in the past 3 years. Any exceptions are all crappy console ports like GTA4 and Saints Row 2. Neither game would have been very demanding if they were even slightly optimised.

Now even graphics card advancements are mostly focussed on tidying up problems experienced in previous generations. Well, apart from AMD that is. They’re still as incapable at coding drivers as they were as ATI.

Really glad the CD Projekt are getting another run at this. While the originals mechanics were novel, they couldn’t quite sustain the length of game they were embedded in. Thankfully the writing and story-telling carried me the rest of the way through. This will be a rare day one purchase for me.

When the gaming history of the last decade is written, Eastern Europe is going to feature highly, and deservedly so.

I often find the minimum requirements say nothing about how optomized a game is, or indeed how well the graphics scale. For instance back in the day crysis didn’t look too bad on medium to low, however some games on low graphics look like a grey mulch.

Very excited for this, despite quitting the first one after a few hours. It had clear potential, but the script and combat was abysmal. This strikes me as much improved, however, which is a very promising prospect.

It’s important to note the difference between a bad translation (which The Witcher frequently suffers from) and a bad script. I actually think The Witcher has one of the best scripts written for games yet, even managing subtext and a decently layered plot.

To make up for CDProjekt’s obvious oversight in game design, Bethesda will be doubling the number of loading screens in Elder Scrolls V. Eurogamer has translated an Austro-Hungarian news report that indicates there will, in fact, be a dream world segment midway through the main quest of Elder Scrolls V “composed almost entirely of…procedurally generated loading screens.”

If you watch the video, you’ll see that they are requiring a dual core processor just for tasks like that. It eases the stress on the rest of the system, and will be even further optimized before release. I can’t wait!

So What you’re saying is, with my quad core processor, if one or two corea are taken up by this background stuff the other two will be dedicated solely to in the moment stuff and it will make everything run better?

@Thants – Bloody well said. After both Just Cause games – where you can assault a mountaintop military base and see mountains and cities that you can travel to forming your backdrop – going back to the restricted level design of other games makes them look incredibly lazy, in the same way that playing GTA3 for the first time made most racing games look like they weren’t trying hard enough.

We can all imagine the possibilities of those incredible engines used for other genres – now which developer is man enough to accept the challenge?

He’s dead wrong on The Wolfman, whose dominant color scheme was black and white. Blue and yellow hues are mainly used for specific locations in what was a beautifully graded, if deeply flawed, film.

Star Trek, for such an expensively produced film, maintained pretty realistic coloration on everyone’s faces despite rotating every color theme they could lay their hands on and punishing epileptics with lens flare (and doing some interesting things with red, silver, and gold.)